Spotlight on infectious diseases

Every moment of every day, our immune systems are battling to keep us healthy against an onslaught from invading organisms. But some of these invaders have evolved to use our very defences against us, writes Dr Stephen Graham, a Sir Henry Dale Fellow.

New diagnostic tests are needed to make vaccination against bovine tuberculosis (bovine TB) viable and the number of false positives from these tests must be below 15 out of every 10,000 cattle tested, according to research published today in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

The University of Cambridge has been awarded £2 million from the UK Medical Research Council and the Government of India’s Department for Biotechnology to develop a partnership with the National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis (NIRT) in Chennai.

Eve, an artificially-intelligent ‘robot scientist’ could make drug discovery faster and much cheaper, say researchers writing in the Royal Society journal Interface. The team has demonstrated the success of the approach as Eve discovered that a compound shown to have anti-cancer properties might also be used in the fight against malaria.

Leah Katzelnick was all set for a career as an anthropologist until she contracted dengue fever. She was in hospital for a week with severe symptoms. It changed her life. She is now working on a new perspective on dengue fever which involves mapping the complex interaction between different strains of the virus, based on similar work done by Cambridge experts on flu.

One in five cases of Lassa fever – a disease that kills around 5,000 people a year in West Africa – could be due to human-to-human transmission, with a large proportion of these cases caused by ‘super-spreaders’, according to research published today in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Researchers criticise reforms advocated by IMF for chronically under-funded and insufficiently staffed health systems in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. They say these policies contributed to “lack of preparedness” of West African health systems to cope with disease and emergencies such as Ebola.

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Research Horizons

Infectious diseases...

Combating infectious diseases remains as important as ever. A combination of basic and applied research has led to some extraordinary success stories, such as the eradication of smallpox. Yet history tells us that the emergence of a new infectious disease that goes on to threaten the health of the global population is a likely scenario.

One of the challenges is to define mechanisms whereby research efforts can be coordinated to achieve synergies between different areas of expertise. The Cambridge Infectious Diseases Initiative is helping to meet this need."